Tech analyst, AI & the web
I founded the tech blog ReadWriteWeb in April 2003 and ran it until October 2012. During my time running the business, it was well known for its cutting edge content (“What’s next on the Web”) and its influential global audience. At its peak, RWW was ranked among the top ten blogs in the world by Technorati.
This category contains all of the articles I personally wrote for RWW, now archived on ricmac.org for easier browsing and search. If you’d like to explore the original context, you can also view a year-by-year archive with links to the Wayback Machine
I’ve just published a list of the top ten defining moments of Web 2.0 this year. Here’s a taster, but please click through to ZDNet to read the whole post. It’s been a huge year for the Web! A time of renewed optimism in Silicon Valley and an incredible number of new web applications. In … Read more
Toni Schneider, who runs the Yahoo Developer Network, just announced the addition of JSON support for various Yahoo APIs and a new Javascript Developer Center. This is designed for people who “eat, sleep and breathe JavaScript” :-0. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. According to the Wikipedia entry, JSON’s simplicity has “resulted in its widespread … Read more
Liked this quote from the recent Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York: “The media plan of the future will look like the tiles of your bathroom floor … a number of component pieces fitted together very precisely, but lots of pieces,” said David Verklin, chief executive of media buyer Carat Americas. Digging a … Read more
Phil Pearson, Marc Canter and others have been burning the midnight candle getting Structured Blogging up and running. It’s live now and Phil has a round-up of all the action. Structured blogging basically means publishing different kinds of information – like events, reviews and classified ads – in a ‘structured’ format, so that aggregators can … Read more
Feedburner has integrated Web services with feeds, in a new product released just now called FeedFlare. I got a sneak preview of FeedFlare and it’s currently activated in my RSS feed. You may have noticed some new active and contextual links at the bottom of each of my posts, in your RSS Aggregator. Things like … Read more
Joshua Porter has written a nice balanced introduction to Web 2.0 on Squidoo. Meanwhile I’m having a running battle with some idiots on the Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. One or more of these clowns keeps deleting any and all references to my websites and articles. Now I know what Dave Winer feels like when he … Read more
John Battelle just posted that Amazon is opening up its Alexa search data and tools to the world! According to John, Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index, which is about 100 terabytes of data. With this move anyone will be able to use Alexa’s index to develop their own services. As John … Read more
I’ve noticed some excellent techie posts lately, so I feel duty-bound to point them out. Phil Pearson, XML expert Kimbro Staken and Movable Type consultant Chad Everett have been working on a Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress and MT. This is to enable ordinary folks (like me) to publish “new microcontent types, support microformats and … Read more
It’s that time of year when everyone brings out their Best Of 2005 and Top Ten lists. I wrote a post this time last year entitled Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004. It didn’t get much of a response, because it was well before the Web 2.0 hype kicked in. Over the past couple of … Read more
Yahoo! has joined forces with the Seven Network, one of Australia’s leading television and media companies. A new 50-50 holding company will be formed that will own Yahoo Australia & NZ and operate under a new name, to be announced in January. A PDF presentation about the deal is here, which states (among other things) … Read more
As TechCrunch reported, Joshua Schachter has announced the sale of Del.icio.us to (who else) Yahoo. Personally I’m thrilled Yahoo got del.icio.us, but I’m hoping they don’t make it into a walled garden like they did with the My Web 2.0 product. Currently a user can export their data from del.icio.us, but they can’t do that … Read more
Here’s the Top Ten Web 2.0 memes, issues or news stories of the past week, as judged by me. 1. Lightnet: open up your media, the Lightnet revolution is here. Lucas Gonze is leading the charge of the lightnet brigade: “The strength of lightnet is that everybody who’s not a media incumbent wants it, and … Read more
Fred Wilson has been thinking about the Web as a Platform concept. Like me, Fred sees this phrase as central to understanding the current era of the Web – known as Web 2.0. I liked how he put it: “I believe the web is a platform. And that everything we need for an open ad … Read more
The Wall St Journal has a great write-up of Gabe Rivera’s tech.memeorandum, although tragically the WSJ misspelled the link! I also enjoyed the comparison made between Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and The Great Gatsby: “Consider a blog like TechCrunch, which chronicles the new breed of Internet start-ups known as Web 2.0 companies. The blogger behind … Read more
Lucas Gonze has been evangelizing a concept called lightnet. He coined the term, based on a recent Alex Barnett post entitled Hypertext and the next 15 years. Check out Lucas’ del.icio.us page full of lightnet links. So what is lightnet? It took me a bit of clicking around to grok it, but basically it’s the … Read more